Government has some bigger roles in the Bush

In a country whose population is so widely dispersed, information technology ought to be a Godsend for government. The capacity to deliver myriad services to people in remote locations is enhanced exponentially by technology available today. It is a method for ensuring that people don’t have to leave rural Australia to have access to those services.

What we need is vision.

Earlier in this century, the public sector embarked on a major enterprise – the Snowy River. People talk about a railway line linking Adelaide to Darwin as a major project worthy of our pursuit. These are small fry compared with what we could do. At the turn of the next century, the greatest, most significant investment we could make is to make sure that every Australian has access to the Internet.

As people begin to conduct more of their business on the Internet, and they will, other avenues of doing business will become obsolete and disappear. If there is more Internet trading in goods, there will be fewer shops from which to purchase goods. If professionals such as lawyers, accountants and engineers realize that they can deliver their services more cheaply over the Internet rather than paying for overheads, such services still provided on a traditional basis will significantly increase in cost. When companies realize that many workers could work from home thus reducing the expenses associated with office accommodation, those not able to work from home will be significantly disadvantaged.

Those who don’t have access to the Internet will be profoundly isolated. Those most at risk of isolation in this regard are those already isolated by distance – rural Australians.

The former Coalition Government in Queensland pursued some important strategies towards avoiding this problem. The Connect.Ed program pursued by Education Queensland had the effect of introducing necessary infrastructure to more remote locations.

The way forward now is to make sure that we continue to maximize the opportunities for people in the bush to gain access to the online world. We need to make sure that there are good training institutions nearby to get people from regional communities into the technical side of the online world. We need to make sure that more companies start to make use of the fact that technology now removes the need of sizeable chunks of commerce to be located in major cities. With the correct infrastructure, many business units can be operated highly successfully in regional areas. The classic example of this is the call centre. Enterprises such as this also benefit the local communities by providing employment in both low and high skill areas.

The Federal Government has played a part through the institution of the Regional Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund.

It comes back to the fact that bush people need access. They need it to get the services that city people take for granted. They deserve it to get a standard of communication, education and living that every person in Australia deserves.

Both of these issues are about essential human rights in a modern nation such as ours.

Human rights evolve over time as a community has the capacity to deliver them. There are certain rights that are inalienable and timeless such as freedom of thought and speech, but in Australia in 1999, people also have the right to be healthy and the right to be informed. They might seem like two divergent areas, but I think that for the bush, they are closely tied together.